Crash

I drove to the hospital numb from head to toe.  I had called my mother and she said it was bad, that my father had been driving on a country road and had run head on into another car.  Inconceivable.  My father was a heavyweight, a champion, a man who fixed problems and solved things, someone the neighbors called in the middle of the night if they heard noises in their backyard.  He was legendary in the family as a strong man.  He'd grown up on a farm and done farm work, gone to the navy and fought in World War II.  He loved to laugh and tell jokes and had a healthy dislike for authority.  Now what?  

Tile and shiny metal and nurses in white.  I was told where to go, told to wait.  Someone came out to say my father had been in an accident, that he would not be able to talk, that he was on a respirator, that I would only be allowed to stay a few minutes with him in the room.  

He looked up when I walked in.  I could see the fear on his face and something else, a disappointment, an embarrassment.  He looked at me with liquid eyes and shook his head from side to side, then he mouthed the words, "I fucked up."  A plastic tube in his throat was hooked to a machine that breathed for him with a metallic intake and exhaustion of air.  I don't remember saying anything before a nurse took me back to the lobby.  

In a bit, a doctor came out, cold, disinterested.  He said my father's chest had been crushed, broken like a jigsaw puzzle.  That is why he was on the respirator, he said, so the chest could heal.  The accident had also broken my father's hip.  He would be in intensive care for some time.  My father was a smoker--Camels--and because he could not cough, they had to suction the mucus from his lungs.  But he was a strong man, the doctor said.  Most people would have been killed by that impact.  

My father, of course, had not been wearing a seat belt and had been thrown into the steering column as the engine was pushed back into his legs.  The other driver, a woman, was wearing hers and had walked away with a slight cut on her forehead.  She was shaken, of course.  

I sat on a bench with plastic covering under the bright white lights that night.  It was cold, freezing, and I shivered and shook all night beneath my big jacket.  How could it be so cold?  I lay down and dozed a bit and woke and thought.  In the morning, I was told there was no reason for me to stay in the lobby, that I should go home and sleep.  They would take care of him, they said, and they let me see him for a few minutes again.  

It was Monday morning.  School was beginning, bells blaring, the sound of shouting voices and feet shuffling on dirty cement walkways.  The quiet of the rooms.  I was out of place, out of time, sitting in the living room of the cracker box house, my mind numb, my body leaden.  What do I do, I thought, what do I do?