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.”
I’m okay, Mom, I wrote. You don’t have to stay.
“No sweetie,” she said. “You’re not okay. And I’m not going anywhere.”
I simply gave her a small half-smile and let my eyes start to slide closed as my family shuffled out the door.
4 1/2 days since the accident
10 months ‘til Air Force?
I woke up with my hands wrapped around my neck, drenched in sweat, and trying to scream my lungs out. I couldn’t remember what I’d just been dreaming about, but Sam’s face lingered in front of me like vapor steam from the shower.
I looked around, trying to orient myself. Muted light started peaking around the curtains, hinting at grey skies that never fully left Washington State it felt like.
In all the chaos that had been the previous day, I hadn’t thought to ask where or what hospital I was at. We didn’t have a hospital on Orcas so I had to be somewhere off-island. Searching the room, my eyes sweeping past my mother’s sleeping form on a couch, I looked for any indicator.
There was a mug sitting near the hand washing sink that read Seattle Children’s Hospital.
Great. I was just months from being a legal adult and I was in a children’s hospital.
Feeling the call of nature, I cautiously slid my legs over the side of the bed. Everything in my body screamed against me not to move. As I looked at my legs, poking out from underneath a baby blue hospital gown, I saw they were covered in mushroom clouds of green and yellow.
Taking a deep breath, and grabbing the IV tower that was attached to me with clear, snaking tubes, I pushed myself to my feet. My muscles felt weak and a bit like rubber. It was embarrassing what a few days in bed had done to me.
The lights in the bathroom blinded me for a second as I flipped them on. The cleanness of the space was almost startling at first. When you share a bathroom with four siblings, you didn’t get the luxury of a clean one too often.
As I sighed in relief, I wondered how I’d managed this the last four days. That was something I didn’t want to dwell on too long.
“Jake?” Mom groggily said. “Jake?” this time her voice sounded a little more panicked.
I was about to call “just taking a leak in here” when the reality of everything hit me again. I flushed the toilet. Nothing like having a toilet speak for you.
Mom dashed into the bathroom, her eyes wild, just like her hair.
“I didn’t expect you to get up by yourself,” she said, her expression calming. She leaned in the doorway and crossed her arms over her chest. “You feel okay?”
I took a breath to speak, but then just nodded my head in response. I stepped around her, back into the room. I was already feeling tired just taking the few steps to the bathroom.
“Dr. Calvin said you’d be feeling weak for a while, since you haven’t had any solid food for a few days. He said you might be able to eat sometime next week.”
Great. As if everything else weren’t going to be bad enough, I couldn’t eat now either.
I shuffled over to a chair that sat pushed into the corner of the room and gently lowered myself into it.
Mom handed me the notebook and pen, an expression of sadness and almost anger mixed on her face. I took it from her, attempting to manage a half-smile. I didn’t think it worked though.
I flipped the notebook open to a blank page. Where is everyone else?
“They’ve been spending nights in a hotel a few miles away,” Mom answered, sinking into the hospital bed. “Your siblings are going back to the island tonight. They’ve missed a bunch of school. They’ll be heading back on the bus with the rest of your classmates. Shelly’s going to stay with them tonight.”
Shelly Smith was our next door neighbor and all five of her kids were long gone and raised. She’d been a surrogate grandmother to me and my siblings whenever she was needed.
“A bunch of your friends called last night, after you fell asleep,” Mom said. The way she said it, the way her eyes didn’t quite meet mine was awkward. “They wanted to see how you were doing.”
I nodded. I suddenly felt awkward too.
Life had changed. Had it changed me? What else was about to change in the future?
You look like you could use a shower, I wrote, half in an attempt to relieve the tenseness, half because she really did look like she could use one.
“Thanks, you little brat,” Mom laughed, glaring at me. I chuckled, but no sound came out.
That had been the weirdest part about everything so far.
“But you’re right,” she said as she sniffed at her arm. “I do kind of smell.” She stood and kissed the top of my head. “There are family showers on one of the upper floors. I’ll be back soon, okay?”
I nodded again and watched as she grabbed some of her stuff and walked out the door.
Things felt too quiet as soon as the door slid shut. It felt like the silence was pushing in on my eardrums. I looked around for the remote to the TV. My eyes froze on the bedside table, on a few of the papers Dr. Calvin had given me the day before.
Being Mute, the title read.
The word seemed to echo in my head, over and over.
Mute
Mute
Mute
I had never thought about that word much before. There were just certain words that you know, but you never really think about, never really consider what they mean.
“Mute” was one of those words.
And suddenly I felt like that word had been slashed into the skin across my neck with a blade.
Or maybe written in permanent, black marker across my forehead:
Hi, I’m Jake Hayes, and I’m MUTE.
I searched for the remote with more aggressive intent, determined to block my own thoughts out. I finally found it dangling from a power cord on the side of the bed and started flipping through channels with furious fingers.
5 days since the accident
Air Force…?
The rest of the family got back to the hospital just after nine. It was easy to tell no one had been sleeping well, and everyone was just a little irritable. But they came prepared to entertain me. Jordan had bought a few card games, Joshua made up his own kind of Pictionary game, Dad brought a few action movies.
I wondered how much being in the hospital was costing the family. We had insurance, but the ferry was two hours from the hospital and then it was another hour on the ferry, and then a twenty minute drive to our house once you got on the island. They weren’t driving back and forth to get all these things. Everything they were bringing for me was brand new. And housing seven people in a hotel couldn’t be cheap.
My dad being an electrician didn’t make us super rich. We weren’t poor exactly, but we were careful with our money.
How much work had Dad had to miss because of me?
The day rolled by slowly, it was nothing but torture to watch each of them eat their lunches, even if it was crappy hospital cafeteria food. My stomach growled. The liquid pumping into my system didn’t exactly make me feel full.
And I watched as the hands on the clock kept ticking steadily forward, the school bus arrival time of three o’clock creeping steadily nearer.
When Jordan arrived that morning she brought along my cell phone, which had been recovered from the accident. The screen was badly cracked where it had been smashed in my back pocket, but it did still work.
It wouldn’t stop vibrating on the bedside table. It seemed like every ten seconds it flashed that I had a new text message from someone. I ignored them all.
I had just gotten out of the bathroom, the entire family gone, when there was a knock on the door. I just managed to sink into a chair, grateful for the sweats and tee-shirt Mom had gotten for me, when the door opened and in popped Rain and Carter.
“You still alive in here?” Rain tried to
joke, his voice not quite pulling it off. I just tried to give a smile and nodded them in. They were followed by about a fourth of the student body of Orcas High School.
My breathing picked up a bit as I watched faces file in. There were so many people crowding into the room that I couldn’t even see the people toward the back. My heart started hammering.
Rain, Carter, River, and Blake all sat on the bed, in the closest proximity of me. And every one of them stared right at the bandages on my neck.
It was a long awkward moment.
Finally, I pulled the notebook into my lap and clicked the pen open.
Hey everyone, I wrote. I held it up for them to see.
“Hey, Jake,” they all murmured, forced looking smiles spreading on their faces. They all seemed to realize that they were supposed to be saying or doing something cause suddenly a bunch of them were asking how I was, saying how glad they were that I was okay, how sorry they were that this happened.
I’m okay, I guess, I wrote. Sore.
They all nodded, sadness filling each of their faces. It was irritatingly quiet again for a long moment.
Was it always going to be like this? With everyone, from now on?
“Dude, I’m really sorry,” Carter finally spoke up, his eyes tortured. He cradled his casted arm with his hand. “If I hadn’t been so drunk I would have just left my phone on the floor, instead of throwing us off a cliff.”
I squeezed my eyes closed, shaking my head just slightly. I didn’t want their apologies. I was pretty wasted too, I wrote. Technically I was the one who threw us off the cliff.
“I shouldn’t have thrown that party in the first place,” Rain said in a hoarse voice. He had a row of stitches above his left eyebrow, a few more on his chin. “It was a totally stupid thing to do.”
I shook my head again. How screwed are we?
“The whole football team got suspended,” Carter answered, his voice rough. “The rest of our games got canceled this year, with no team left to play. Dad was beyond pissed.”
Carter had probably gotten the worst of the wrath, being the principal’s son, and the quarterback of the football team.