When He Fell

5 MADDIE

I am just coming back to the hospital at around nine in the morning when Mrs. James from Burgdorf calls me.

“Maddie,” she says, and her voice is as smooth and assured as ever. “I just wanted to check how Ben is doing.”

I grit my teeth; I don’t know why her concern irritates me, but it does. I imagine her at her desk, scratching off the first item on her to-do list. Call Maddie Reese. “He’s still in a coma, Ruth,” I say before I can help myself. Our headmistress has never invited anyone to address her by her first name. “So I’m afraid I can’t really answer that question.”

There is a slightly chilly pause. “I’m sorry to hear that. Of course, if there is anything we at Burgdorf can do…” She lets this useless sentiment hang in the air for a moment before she continues, “I’ve asked Mrs. Rollins to keep his homework assignments for him.”

I almost laugh, or maybe scream. Does she actually think I care about Ben’s homework assignments?

Mrs. James seems to be waiting for me to say something, probably thank you, but I can’t make myself say it. Instead I hear myself say in a hard voice, “I’d like to know more about Ben’s accident.”

Silence.

“What…what do you mean?” Mrs. James asks, and although she still sounds assured, her delivery isn’t quite as smooth, and suspicion hardens inside me. First Juliet, now Mrs. James. What the hell is going on?

“Just what I said,” I say. “Nobody has told me anything except that Ben fell. Where did he fall? How? Where were the playground supervisors when this happened? Why didn’t they see anything?” Juliet. Where was Juliet?

“I don’t know all the details,” Mrs. James says after a second’s pause, “as I wasn’t there. But of course I can talk to Mrs. Rollins—”

“You mean you haven’t already?” I cut across her. “A child at your school suffers a life-threatening injury and you haven’t even talked to his teacher?”

Mrs. James is silent. “Ms. Reese,” she finally says, and her voice is quiet, commanding. “I understand you are worried about your son. But please be assured that we have followed all the protocols this situation requires—”

“This situation is my son’s life,” I shoot back. “I don’t care about protocols. I want details. Answers. I want to know how my son fell, and why no one even noticed. I want to know what the hell happened.”

I hear Mrs. James’s sharply indrawn breath but I don’t care if I’ve offended her. I am too angry.

“I will talk to Mrs. Rollins as soon as possible,” Mrs. James says stiffly. “And let you know what she says in due course.”

“Fine,” I answer. “Please call me back as soon as you can.” I’m not going to thank her for doing her damn job. And yet as I disconnect the call I wonder at the wisdom of throwing a fit at my son’s headmistress. But then maybe she won’t be his headmistress any more. Maybe Ben won’t be going back to Burgdorf; maybe he won’t be able to.

I slide my phone into my bag and hurry into the hospital; I’ve been away from Ben for nearly two hours. I am shaking from my conversation with Mrs. James, but I force that out of my mind as I approach the heavy double doors that lead to the ER and Ben’s room.

The new nurse on duty informs me that Ben is now stable enough for him to be transferred to the neurology department. I wait for an hour before they are finally ready to transfer him; I watch with my heart in my mouth as two orderlies carefully move his supine body from the bed to the stretcher. Machines attached to him beep and shriek and I resist the impulse to cover my ears with my hands.

I follow them up to the neurology department, which is an oasis of calm compared to the ER. There are no sirens or screams, no weeping or groans. Every patient has a private room and the nurses and doctors seem both focused and friendly. The knot of tension that has resided between my shoulder blades since I first got that phone call loosens ever so slightly.

Now that Ben is in the neurology department, he has a new doctor, a brain injury specialist, Nadine Velas. She introduces herself to me as soon as Ben is settled, taking me to her private office and pouring me a Dixie cup of water which I sip awkwardly.

“So, Ms. Reese.” She scans Ben’s file. “May I call you Madeleine?”

“Maddie,” I say, and she looks up and smiles.

“Maddie. I know things have been moving very fast for you, and you’ve probably had a ton of information thrown at you. So I’m here to ask you if you want to ask me any questions.” She smiles again and waits, her hands folded on her desk. She is a pretty, vibrant woman in her mid-forties; I can see a bright pink top underneath her white lab coat. I instinctively like her, more than the stern-faced doctor down in the ER.

I have about a million questions to ask her, but I manage just one. “When do you think Ben will wake up?”

“I can’t answer that for certain,” she tells me. “But if he remains stable through the next few days, we’ll start considering reducing the medication that is keeping him in a comatose state. For better or worse, the brain is a tricky thing. There is no predicting how it, and how Ben, will react to the lowered dosage. So if his body resists and he experiences another storming episode…” She waits, eyebrows raised, to check if I know the lingo, and I nod. “Then we’ll have to proceed very carefully. But for now I’d say we’ll start considering when to wake him up in the next forty-eight hours.”

I nod, suddenly overwhelmed because yesterday Dr. Stein was telling me the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours would be critical to Ben’s survival. Now Dr. Velas isn’t talking about if he survives, but when he wakes up. This is progress.

“I also should say at this point that there are no guarantees about what Ben’s capabilities will be when he does come out of the coma,” Dr. Velas continues, her tone one of quiet warning. My relief lasted all of two seconds. “It’s impossible to tell how badly his brain has been injured, or what faculties will be affected.” She pauses to check I’ve digested this, and I manage another nod, this one jerky. “His movements might be limited, or his speech or his memory, or all three. I simply cannot say at this stage.”

“Can’t you…can’t you tell from the CT scan he had when he first came to the ER?” I ask.

“We can tell what kind of injury he has,” Dr. Velas agrees, “and in this case, we know he has a contusion on the left temporal lobe. How that manifests itself when he is conscious, we’ll just have to see.”

“But the contusion…” I stumble slightly over the word, “will heal, won’t it? Isn’t it just like a…like a bruise?”

“Yes,” Dr. Velas says gently, “a bruise on the brain. There will still almost certainly be existing and pervasive brain damage.”

The words together jar me; they are what I haven’t wanted to face. Brain damage. I don’t want to associate them with Ben, with my son, with my life. And yet Dr. Velas spoke them with an awful, quiet certainty.

I spend the rest of the day alternating between the waiting room, the hospital’s restaurant, and Ben’s room. I sit by his bed and study his face, his rounded cheeks, his sandy brown hair, the freckles dusted across his nose.

Sitting there in the quiet solitude, the only sound the steady beep of the machines that surround him, measuring all the vital signs I don’t really understand, I let my mind wander through the last nine and a half years of Ben’s life. I search for good memories, and I am ashamed at how few of them there actually are. So much of my life with Ben has been a weary struggle through a blur of days: the exhaustion of his infancy, the endless tantrums of his toddlerhood, and then off to school where I was always wrestling and negotiating and ultimately relenting. Summers and holidays have been a maze of patched-together childcare; as an Alwin employee I get seventeen days of vacation a year. Ben has three months of summer vacation. None of this has been easy.

But there are moments I remember, moments I hang on to now. Ben taking his first steps, toddling across the living room while I wait with my arms outstretched, his incredulous, beaming grin branding my heart. A vacation we took when he was five and he still liked to snuggle, at least a little bit; hugging Ben has always been like trying to hold on to a fish. That summer we rented a tiny cottage on Fire Island for a week and played on the beach all day long, read stories at night. I felt like a real mother, like the kind of mother I’d wanted growing up, the kind of mother I wanted to be to Ben if I could only figure out how. If I could only be strong enough.

Then I let myself think of more recent memories, of afternoons in Central Park with Lewis and Josh. In September Lewis brought kites he’d made himself and we flew them in the Sheep Meadow, laughing, our heads tilted towards the bright blue sky. Movies at Lincoln Center, bowling downtown, a trip to the working farm in Queens. In the last two years the four of us have spent a lot of time together. Happy times; the memories are infused with a golden light, like a movie montage.

We were almost like a family. The family I’ve never had. At least, it felt that way to me, and I think it did to Ben too. Over the last year he’d started asking about his dad, wanting to know details, and of course I couldn’t give him any. But I could give him time with Lewis. That felt important, necessary, even as I recognized it couldn’t possibly have been as important or necessary to Lewis as it was to us.

I was the one embroidering daydreams, letting myself pretend it all meant more than it did. Lewis was just hanging out with his kid and his kid’s friend. I know this, of course I know this, but it still sits like a leaden weight inside me.

Juliet texts me at lunchtime: Thinking of you xo which makes me grit my teeth. That’s it? One lousy text? I don’t reply.

By two o’clock in the afternoon Ben’s condition is neither worse nor better, which frustrates me. I want Ben to wake up and smile at me and ask for his soccer ball. I want someone to talk to; the loneliness, a loneliness I’ve dealt with my whole life, is starting to make me feel crazy.

I was raised in foster homes since I was four years old, so I know a lot about loneliness. My parents divorced when I was a baby, and my father walked out without, as far as I know, a backward glance. I certainly never saw him again. My mother spiraled down into depression, according to the files I accessed when I was eighteen, and when I was four I was removed from her care for ‘gross neglect’. Apparently I only weighed twenty-eight pounds, so she must have forgotten to feed me. I don’t remember any of it, not even a few blurred snatches of memory. It’s as if a curtain has been drawn across the first four years of my life. I do remember monitored visits with my mother over the next few years, as the social services sought to find a way to get us back together. I remember sitting on a hard plastic chair while a woman across from me, a woman who still has a blurred face, talked and sometimes cried quietly. I remember wanting to leave, fidgeting because I needed to pee, feeling uncomfortable and impatient and confused.

When I was eight the visits ended; my mother had killed herself.

By that time I’d been bounced around a few foster homes. I’d had a couple of long-term placements, but as I wasn’t ‘available to adopt’, I was always relinquished, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes not so reluctantly, back to the system. I was a quiet, morose kid, and I grew into a surly and wild teenager. My mother had been an only child whose parents were dead and my father was AWOL, so there were no relatives to take an interest.

And then, when I was fourteen, there was Esme. Esme was a career foster mother who always had a couple of kids in her duplex in Haddonfield, New Jersey. She was cheerful, brisk, and didn’t take any bullshit. She saved me from spiraling down like my mother did, into depression or drugs or worse. With her help, I finished high school and got into Rutgers for college; I completed a degree in Business Studies, admittedly overwhelmed by college loans, and then an internship at Alwin.

She’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to family, but we aren’t even that close. Esme has had a dozen foster kids go through her home since I was there, and she tries to keep in touch with them all but there’s so many, and besides, the ones she really cares about are the ones currently living with her. I’ve seen her a few times over the last ten years; I took Ben to see her when he was a baby, and she cooed over him before being distracted by the hell-raising five-year-old twins she’d taken on board. I understand the limitations placed on her, and I’ve been okay with that. I’ve had to be.

But now I break down and call her, because there is no one else.

“Maddie!” She sounds genuinely pleased to hear from me. “How are you, sweetie?”

“Not so good, Esme.” I take a shuddering breath. “Ben’s in the hospital.” Quickly I explain what happened, and Esme clucks her sympathy before saying, quite sincerely,

“I wish there was something I could do.”

Which says it all, really. Because she is acknowledging there isn’t.

We chat for a few more minutes and then I hang up the phone, feeling worse than before. Who else is in my life? Ben’s father has never, not even remotely, been in the picture. Juliet was my best friend but she’s clearly not all that interested; I have a few acquaintances from work with whom I’ve eaten lunch or grabbed a coffee during a break, but they’re hardly people I’d go to in an emergency. None of the parents from Burgdorf are on more than quick-smile-by-the-school-door terms, except for Lewis.

And as much as I want to, I know I can’t call Lewis. Not again. He didn’t respond to my one-word voicemail except to cancel our plans. Which means, I realize, that he must not know about Ben’s accident. But Josh must know. Josh might have seen him fall. They always play together at recess. Why wouldn’t Josh tell Lewis that Ben fell?

I grab my phone and press Lewis’s number. My heart is beating hard as I prepare for a conversation, perhaps a confrontation, but the phone just switches over to voicemail, and disappointment crashes through me. This time I don’t leave a message.

6 JOANNA

Her words hang in the air as Lewis, Mrs. James, and I all look at each other. Lewis shifts in his chair; his hands have balled into fists.

“Why,” I finally manage, “do you think Josh pushed Ben?”

“I spoke to Mrs. Rollins this morning and several children have mentioned it,” Mrs. James says. “They are…concerned.”

But Josh is not a pusher. He’s never aggressive. Ben is the one who is hyperactive, who bounces around, who has no boundaries. Ben is the one who would push.

“I think,” Mrs. James says, “we should call Joshua in here to speak with us.”

“I’d like to discuss this a little more first,” I say as firmly as I can. “I don’t want Josh to be intimidated—”

“There is no intimidation involved, Mrs. Taylor-Davies,” Mrs. James says in quelling tones. I give her a disbelieving look and she has the grace to look slightly abashed. “We all want answers,” she says in a quieter tone.

“You’re acting like you’ve already found them.” Lewis’s voice is even and measured but I can feel the latent anger underneath it. I think Mrs. James can too.

“Based on what I’ve heard this morning, it seems quite clear that Joshua pushed Ben,” she answers.

“So you mean it was an accident,” Lewis says after a moment, his voice so very even.

Mrs. James’s purses her lips. “I’m not sure about that, Mr. Taylor-Davies.”

My whole body goes rigid and I can’t speak, can’t process what she is implying. “That’s bullshit,” Lewis says calmly.

Mrs. James stiffens. “Mr. Taylor-Davies, please.”

“Two nine-year-old boys messing around in a playground, and there is an accident. What are you trying to turn this into?”

“I am simply trying to find the facts of the matter,” Mrs. James answers with chilly dignity. “Ben’s mother, Madeleine Reese, has some questions. We, as a school, need to give her the right answers—”

“I know Maddie,” Lewis cuts across her. “She’s not behind this. You’re looking for someone to pin this onto, God only knows why, and it’s not Josh.”

“All I’m suggesting is that we talk to Joshua and see what he has to say for himself, so we can deal with the matter appropriately.”

“Appropriately?” Lewis repeats disbelievingly. “What the hell does that mean?”

Mrs. James draws herself up. “Naturally Burgdorf does not tolerate violence of any kind.”

“My son is not violent,” I say quietly. “If Josh pushed Ben, it was nothing more than an accident as my husband just said. A very unfortunate and tragic accident.” My voice trembles and I gaze at her, daring her to contradict me. “I can’t believe you would suggest otherwise.”

“I am not suggesting anything,” Mrs. James says primly, “other than that we ask Joshua to join us so he can explain himself.”

“Fine,” Lewis says, biting off the word. “Go get Josh.”

Mrs. James calls for her PA and we wait in tense silence while our son is fetched. My mind is racing, racing. Why wouldn’t Josh tell us about Ben’s fall? I’m afraid of the answer: because he pushed him. But why would Josh push Ben? He doesn’t push. He doesn’t get angry; he goes quiet. Nothing makes sense.

A few minutes later Josh appears in the doorway, his eyes huge and dark in his pale face. I rise from my chair and go to hug him; his shoulders are bony and thin under my hands and he leans into me for a second before he moves away.

“Josh, sweetie,” I say quietly. “Mrs. James and Dad and I want to talk to you about what happened yesterday.”

He nods slowly, and a sigh escapes him, a sound of defeat. “Okay.”

“Joshua, why don’t you sit down,” Mrs. James says. Her voice is brisk and to me it sounds unwelcoming. I grit my teeth, wishing she could try a little harder.

Josh takes a seat next to Lewis and rests his hands on the armrests of the chair; they look pale and thin, his fingernails bitten down to the quick. I wonder if that is recent; I don’t remember Josh biting his nails before.

“Joshua, can you tell me what happened yesterday at the playground?” Mrs. James asks.

Josh doesn’t answer. Seconds tick by, and no one says anything. I can feel tension knotting my shoulders, dread pooling like acid in my stomach.

I take a deep breath. “Josh,” I say softly. “Please answer Mrs. James.”

He takes a deep breath. “Ben fell,” he finally says, his voice so soft we all strain to hear it.

“How did he fall?” Mrs. James asks. Josh doesn’t answer. “Joshua?” Impatience sharpens her voice. “Did you and Ben have an argument? Were you fighting on the playground?”

“Talk about leading questions,” Lewis mutters.

“No,” Josh says softly.

“No, you weren’t fighting?” Mrs. James clarifies. She sounds like a lawyer.

“No,” Josh says again, and this time his voice is clear. He looks up at Mrs. James and meets her narrowed gaze unblinkingly. “We weren’t fighting.” And then he sets his jaw and I know we’d have an easier time pulling teeth rather than words from his mouth.

“Joshua, this is quite serious, you know,” Mrs. James says. “Some children in your class have said they saw you talking heatedly with Ben. They say they saw you push him.”

“And you trust their word over Josh’s?” Lewis demands.

Mrs. James swings towards Lewis to look at him severely. “When it is several children, yes, I do, Mr. Taylor-Davies. Yes, I do.”

“We weren’t fighting,” Josh says again. He sounds obstinate.

“Please,” I interject. “No matter how it came about, this was clearly an accident. Children push each other all the time. It’s just that a brain injury doesn’t normally result.”

Now I’m on the receiving end of one of Mrs. James’s chilly stares. “We take bullying very seriously here at Burgdorf, Mrs. Taylor-Davies.”

Bullying? The idea that Josh could be bullying Ben is ludicrous, laughable. Surely this woman realizes that.

“My son is not a bully,” Lewis says.

“We have policies in place to deal with physical aggression,” Mrs. James continues. “An act of this nature results in one week’s suspension. Any further infractions will require the Board to reconsider Joshua’s place at Burgdorf.”

It’s as if she’s lobbed a grenade right onto our laps. Lewis and I gape. Mrs. James sits with her hands primly folded in front of her and waits.

“Are you saying,” Lewis finally asks in a low voice, “that my son might be expelled? For possibly pushing one kid one time?”

“No, I am saying he will be suspended for one week, starting immediately,” Mrs. James answers. “If there is a repeat infraction, then we will be forced to consider expulsion.”

Her face is a bland mask as she holds our incredulous gazes. What has happened, I wonder in disbelief, to Burgdorf’s nurturing the whole child, ‘place of positivity’ atmosphere? It’s all a crock of shit, apparently, just as Lewis has said.