“Nothing, Mom,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong. I just need you to stay up for me, okay? I’m on my way.”
I sat up straighter. “On your way? It’s after one.”
“I know. I’m bringing someone home. I want you to meet her tonight.”
I smiled despite myself, still groggy, still piecing the world back together after being pulled from sleep. “A girl,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.
“No. Well. Not like that.” He paused, and something in the pause felt heavier than the words around it. “She’s someone very special, Mom. I’ve been wanting to introduce you for a while and tonight felt like the right time. Just trust me, okay? I’ll explain everything when I get there.”
I told him I’d be up. I told him to drive carefully. He said he would, and then he was gone, and I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark for a moment, listening to the quiet of the house. There had been something in his voice that I could not name right away. Not worry, exactly. Something older than worry. Something that sounded like the careful tone people use when they are carrying something fragile and don’t want to drop it before they reach the person they are carrying it toward.
I went to the kitchen and put on coffee. I stood at the counter while it brewed and thought about Leo at his campus volunteering job, which he had mentioned a few times but never in great detail, the way young people mention things they consider self-explanatory and don’t think to elaborate on. I thought about the word special, the careful way he had placed it in the sentence. Not a girlfriend. Someone special. I tried to imagine who she might be and found I couldn’t, and eventually I stopped trying and just listened to the coffee maker and the silence of a house at one in the morning.
At two minutes past two, the phone rang again. Not Leo’s name this time. A number I didn’t recognize, and beneath it the name of the hospital fourteen miles away.
I do not remember the drive. I have tried, in the weeks since, to reconstruct it, to locate some visual memory of the road or the dashboard or the dark fields on either side of the highway, but there is nothing. What I remember is the parking lot, the fluorescent shock of the emergency entrance, my own hands on the door handle and the strange observation that they were shaking. I remember a nurse at the reception desk asking me something and the words not quite reaching me, as though there were glass between us. I remember saying my son’s name and watching her face change into the particular expression hospital workers use when they are about to deliver difficult information in a professional manner.
Leo was in surgery. He was alive, but they used the word barely, and I remember that word landing in my chest like something heavy dropped from a height. There had been a head-on collision on Route 9. He was twenty minutes away. Another car had crossed the center line. Leo had been driving.
The waiting room was a place I could not stay in. I paced the corridor outside it, back and forth over the same twelve feet of linoleum, holding my phone even though there was no one to call, no one who needed to know, no one whose presence would make this smaller. It has always been just the two of us. I made my peace with that a long time ago, but there are moments when the aloneness of it presents itself with a particular sharpness, and this was one of them.
A doctor came out to speak to me. She was calm and precise in the way doctors learn to be, and she told me Leo was in surgery, stable but serious, and that they would update me as soon as there was more to report. Then she said there was a female passenger in the other vehicle, or perhaps she was with Leo, they weren’t entirely sure. She had been brought in unconscious. She had no identification on her. She was currently in a coma.
