What I Didn't Say (4 page)

“Hey, Mom,” I heard Jordan say.  “I think he’s starting to wake up.”

I heard the sound of shuffling feet, accompanied by beeping and a bunch of other sounds I didn’t recognize.  A sliver of light appeared as my eyelids struggled to open. 

It felt weird when I breathed.

“Jake,” I heard the familiar sound of my mom’s voice.  “Jake, are you awake?”

I tried to tell her that I was, but it felt like my throat was swollen to the point of almost being sealed shut.

“Mom,” I heard my other younger sister, Jamie, hiss.  “He can’t now, remember?”

My eyes slid open just a little more, seeing my mom’s face blanch.  She was sitting on the side of whatever surface I laid on and it took me a moment to realize that I wasn’t lying on my own bed.  The lights above me were all wrong.

I finally registered the other faces in the room, all eight of them.  My big, crazy family.  Three brothers and three sisters, and both parents.

A stream of tears rolled down Mom’s face as she looked at me, my eyes now fully open.

I would have panicked at that sight.  Mom didn’t cry.  But then I realized where I was.

I was in a hospital. 

A hospital room that was decorated with seashells and cartoony sea creatures.

A small whimper escaped Mom’s throat and she reached for Dad’s hand.  Johnson Hayes, father to all seven of the children in the room, just stared at me in a maddening way.

I opened my mouth to ask
“what’s going on?”
when searing pain ripped through my throat.  My hands shot to it, but my entire body screamed.

“Don’t move, Jake,” Jordan cried, her hands flashing to pull my hands away.  My fingers brushed what felt like gauze at my throat before she pulled my hands back.  “Don’t.”

On instinct, I went to ask
“what happened?”
when the pain ripped through me again.  My eyes turned frantically to my family.

Something had happened to me.  The last thing I remembered was my stupid drinking haze, and something about a deer.

Having everyone stare at me, not saying a word was going to drive me insane.  I felt panic eating at me, a kind of terror I had never felt before.  And it hurt too much to ask what had happened.

So I simply pointed at my oldest brother, the oldest child in our family, John.  Giving me a meaningful look, John cleared his throat.

“You were in a car accident, Jake,” John said with a husky voice.  “Do you remember that?”

I tried to make my frantic thoughts focus for a second, to think back to the last thing I remembered.  I was sure it was the deer.  And then I remembered the sound of the tire popping.  And the feeling of steel too close to my skin.

I nodded.

“Carter was trying to find his phone or something, he said you jerked the wheel so he wouldn’t hit a deer.  Apparently he was drunk, guess you all were,” John’s voice hardened a little in anger.  I felt my heartbeat quicken.

“John,” Mom managed to get out.  “Are you sure we shouldn’t wait until the doctor gets back to tell him?” 

I shook my head, just a little.  More pain ripped through me.  But I didn’t care.  I had to know what had happened.  Now.

John nodded his head, understanding.  “You guys swerved off the side of the road.  There was a pretty big ledge where the truck went off.  The truck slammed to the ground and rolled onto its side.  You all rolled…” his voice cut off for a second.  John placed a fist over his mouth and tried to clear his throat.  A single tear slipped down his cheek.  “You all rolled…  You rolled onto the side of the truck.  Right onto a t-post.  It broke right through the passenger window.  It…” John didn’t seem able to talk anymore. 

“The t-post skewered you, right through the neck,” my older sister Jenny said.  Jenny had never been afraid of anything, not even to deliver the earth-shattering news.  “It might have been okay, but with the truck tipped, Carter and Rain piled on top of you, and it made it worse.”

My head was spinning.  I felt sick.  I was pretty sure I was going to throw up but tried with everything in me not to.  Just trying to talk was torture.  I couldn’t imagine what having the contents of my stomach come up would do to me.

“That’s enough, you guys,” Johnson said, speaking for the first time.  “No more until Dr. Calvin gets here.”

I wanted to protest, to demand that they tell me every little horrifying detail, now.  But I knew something was so beyond wrong, so wrong that I couldn’t form even a single word.

“It’s going to be okay, Jake,” seven-year-old Joshua said, climbing onto my bed and laying his head on my chest.  Despite the pain in my arms, I placed my hand on Josh’s back and rubbed small circles into it. 

My arms hurt from all the cuts and stitches.  I then remembered the window had shattered on the passenger side.  The side I’d been sitting on.

A nurse opened the door to the room, asking if we needed some help.

“Could you call Dr. Calvin?” Johnson asked her quietly.  “Jake’s awake.”

“He’ll be right down,” she answered, giving me a sad glance. 

I tried to block it all out as we waited, all the beeping, the weird smell, the hard bed.  The downfallen expressions every single one of my family members wore.  I imagined I was back at the football game, catching that interception and making a break for the goal line.  And I imagined Samantha, exactly where she had been in the stands, cheering the Vikings on.

I imagined her screaming my name as I made a touchdown.

“Jake?” a voice called, tearing me from my daydream back into reality.  My eyes lifted to a man with the shiniest shaved head I’d ever seen.  Grey eyes looked back at me from behind silver wire rimmed glasses.  “I’m Dr. Calvin.  I’ve been taking care of you for the last four days.”

Four days?
 

I’d lost
four days
?

“I assume your family explained what happened?” Dr. Calvin asked as he pulled up a rolling stool.  The room was starting to feel very crowded with ten people in it.

“Just the accident,” Mom spoke up.  Her voice still sounded rough.   Josh hopped off the bed and crawled up into Jenny’s lap.

“Okay,” Dr. Calvin said, digging through a manila folder.  He pulled out a few pieces of paper and handed them to me.  I took the pages but didn’t look at them.  I simply waited to hear the news that could be nothing but crushing.

“First off, I have to say that you’re very lucky to be alive.” 

I closed my eyes for a moment.  It’s still really bad when a doctor says that. 

“The post that crashed through the window in your friend’s truck lodged into your neck.  It came in through here,” Dr. Calvin lightly touched his fingers to the side of my neck.  “And came out here,” he touched another place on my neck, not quite center on the front of my neck.  “When your friends crashed down on you, it shifted the post and it embedded itself right in your vocal chords.  It also did significant damage to your wind pipe.”

I gave a hard, painful swallow.  The fire that ripped through me would never be as painful as the words I knew the doctor was going to say next.

“Your vocal chords were essentially ripped out,” the doctor said simply, his face all too serious.  I wasn’t sure if I appreciated his direct approach or not.  “You were in surgery for five hours, we tried the best we could to repair the damage.  We managed to repair your esophagus, got you breathing on your own again.  But…” 

The room started spinning around me, my head feeling like it might float away from the rest of my body.

“I’m afraid we weren’t able to save your vocal chords.”

Small black spots swam on the edges of my vision. 

“Jake,” the doctor half sighed.  “With how extensive the damage was, and with how the pole hit your neck, we had to remove the vocal chords completely, what little there was left to remove.  You’re…” he trailed off.  I wondered how many times a day he had to deliver life destroying news.  “You’re not going to be able to talk again.”

I let out a long breath when Dr. Calvin finally said it.  The words I knew were going to be said as soon as I had tried to speak.

Dr. Calvin started talking about treatment plans, my recovery over the next few days, options about my future, how I was lucky I hadn’t been paralyzed, but I didn’t hear any of it, not really.  Everything dropped away, and the world fell very quiet and still.

One by one, I saw the things I loved dropping away.

The Air Force.

Football.

Oddly enough, school.

But mostly, Samantha.

I’d never gotten to tell her.

“Here,” a voice said, pulling me back into the room again.  Jordan pushed a spiral notebook and a pen across the bedside table to me.  “You can write down anything you have to say.”

I looked up at my sister, so close in age to myself, only eleven months apart, and tried to manage a small smile.  I looked around the room to see everyone looking at me expectantly.  I realized Dr. Calvin had left.

“Are you okay, Jake?” ten year-old James asked.  I just stared at him blankly.

“Hush, James,” Mom hissed.  She wiped at her eyes with a tissue.  I wished she would stop crying.  I could count on one hand the number of times I had seen my mom cry and they had all been when someone had died.

I wasn’t dead.

Trying to turn the attention away from me, I reached for the notebook and opened the cover.  The pages stared up at me, too white and too crisp.  It felt wrong, that those perfect pages would have to do my imperfect talking.

Carter and Rain?
I wrote in sloppy handwriting.  My entire arm ached when I used it.

“They’re both okay,” Mom answered, finally seeming to pull herself together.  “Carter’s left arm is broken, Rain got a good handful of stitches.  But they’re both okay.”

“You got the worst of it, since the truck landed on your side,” Jenny said.

I nodded my head, trying to act like I didn’t care about that last part.

We in trouble for the drinking?

“You better believe you’re in trouble,” Mom shot, back to her normal self.  “What were you doing at a party like that Jacob Hayes?”

A smile nearly cracked on my lips as I just gave a shrug.  All the siblings laughed.

“I can’t believe you all went and did a stupid thing like that.  I’ll let your teammates tell you all the drama there tomorrow,” Mom shook her head.

?

“Everyone wants to see you,” Jordan answered.  “A lot of people are coming down on a bus tomorrow after lunch.  They’re catching the one o’clock ferry.”

How many coming?

“Probably half the school,” she answered, reading my scribbled handwriting.  “My cell phone hasn’t stopped ringing the last four days.  I’m up to over a thousand texts, all asking about you.”

I took another painful swallow.  I didn’t want the entire school seeing me like this.  But I couldn’t say that, and it felt too incriminating to write it down.

“Don’t worry about that right now,” Mom said as she sat on the side of my bed again, taking my cut up hand in hers.  “You should probably get some rest.  Why don’t you all go get some dinner and let Jake get some sleep?” she said to the rest of the family.  “I’ll stay with him.”