"If you'll wait just a minute," the lady at the sign-in desk, "the doctor will talk to you."
Dr. Phillips, anyway that's what the name on his white coat said, found me, introduced himself, and led me to a small office.
"Sit down, David," he said, and I sat.
He took a deep breath and said, "Okay, Son, the news is not good. There's no gentle way to say it, so I'll just spell it out. It appears that your father had a heart attack. We won't know until we do the postmortem, but based on a gross examination, he had a widowmaker and was probably dead, certainly dying, as the car went off the road."
I sat, listening, probably in shock or at least the mental equivalent. I didn't feel anything.
He was silent for a few seconds, watching me, waiting for a reaction I suppose.
When I said nothing, he went on.
"When the car went off the road, your mother, who apparently was
not
belted in hit her head on the windshield and broke her neck. There is no doubt that she was dead before the car went into the water."
"Into the water?" I asked, my mind finding something concrete to grab onto.
"Yes," he said, "it went off the road, rolled over, and wound up in a little stream."
I said nothing and he went on.
"Your sister, anyway we assume it was your sister based on last names found on identification,
was
belted in and survived the crash okay. She got incredibly lucky and a passerby got her out of the car. She had, technically, drowned, but the Good Samaritan got her out and did CPR. She's unconscious right now."
He wound down then so I asked the obvious question, "She's all right, then?"
The look on his face said more than the words that followed.
"David," he said, leaning forward a little and touching my arm. "your sister drowned. She wasn't breathing when he got her out of the car and we don't know how long she was without oxygen. She's breathing on her own, and that's all I know right now."
"Is she a," and I paused, looking for the right word and there was no gentle way to ask what I had to ask, "Is she a vegetable?"
"We can't know that until she wakes up," he said.
We passed a few seconds in an awkward silence.
"David," he said, "this is a lot, I know. Let me give you a bit of advice. Go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow look around and see if your parents left a will and other papers. Call your lawyer to check on that stuff. And get ahold of a funeral home to get that procedure started."
He paused, gave my shoulder kind of a friendly shake, and asked, "How old are you, David?"
"19," I said.
"Well," he said, "at least you're legal and we don't have to worry about Child Protective Services or anything."
"Oh, shit," I said.
"Yeah," he said and gave my shoulder another of those little shakes, "Go home now, try to get some sleep. Have a beer. You're the man of the house now so start getting your head ready for that role."
So I did.
I went home, got a beer, and sat with the television on. I can't say I watched it. It was just background noise.
I wondered why I wasn't crying.
I've known, well, pretty much all of my life that I'm cold-blooded about many things. In my philosophy class, for example, when those questions came up about "Could you kill this many people to accomplish that goal?" it was always simple to me. You did the arithmetic and if the benefit/cost worked out in favor of killing them, you dropped the damn bomb. One of my favorite fictional characters is Matt Helm, a character from the 1960s (the book series ran through the 1990s) that one blurb described as the "American agent who makes Jimmy Bond look like the English fop he is." Eric (the character's "code name") had no qualms at all about just shooting someone dead because he didn't want to leave a live enemy behind. I applauded him. Later, when I watched the series "24," I would regularly criticize Jack Bauer or Tony Almeda for taking a chance because a wife or daughter was being held hostage. My attitude was always, "Sorry, Kim" or "Sorry, Michelle, but with one life measured against hundreds of thousands, you're going to have to die."
But I still wondered.
Then I woke up.
I was on the couch so I guess I just dropped off.
And my first thought was that I had absolutely no fucking idea what to do.
So I threw a couple of
Eggos
into the toaster and made a cup of coffee.
"Jesus," I said aloud, and finally the tears came.
I sat and cried as I made coffee and ate my
Eggos
.
"What the fuck am I supposed to do," I said, over and over.
After a while, I drew in a deep breath, held it, and let it out.
"Gather thine shit about thee," I said aloud, my version of "get your shit together."
I took another deep breath, sat, and thought for a few minutes.
I looked up the hospital number, using my favorite shortcut. I looked up St. Joseph's Hospital on Google Maps and hit the little "call" icon.
"St. Joseph's, hold please," a woman's voice said. Before I could reply I was forced to listen to some atrocious on-hold music, a vaguely recognizable version of
Ain't Misbehavin'
.
I waited.
"St. Joseph's, this is Ann, how can I direct your call?" a new voice said.
"This is David Morgan, you have my sister, Lindsey there. She was in a car wreck last night. Who can I talk to for an update?" I asked.
"Hold please," she said, and that fucking music started again.
"Mister Morgan?" a man's voice this time.
"Yes, David Morgan, how's my sister?" I replied.