In the Event of Contact by Ethel Rohan

Author:Ethel Rohan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: In the Event of Contact
ISBN: 9781950539406
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dr. McCormack loomed over Dave in his hospital bed and listed his injuries in a singsong litany: fractured skull, smashed patella, three cracked ribs, and numerous hematomas. Dave could almost hear the rattle of his brokenness. He would have to undergo surgery on his right knee, the doctor continued, just as soon as the swelling on his brain came down. “All things considered, you’re a very lucky man.” Dave didn’t know what horrified him more: the extent of his injuries or seeing his swaddled head twinned in the doctor’s spectacles.

Day eight in the hospital, Dave lay recovering from a successful knee surgery. By then, the constant pain, noise, boredom, vital checks, and taint of antiseptic were overwhelming. He’d clicked the dispenser on his morphine drip so often a blister had formed on his thumb. The obsessive action was pointless, the drip’s dose timed and regulated, but he couldn’t stop himself. His attention returned to the orange plastic chair next to his bed, forever empty. He signaled to a nurse, the one with the wide parting in her hair like a scar. “Please take that away.”

Dave was seven when his mother died from multiple sclerosis. The chairs by her hospital bed were gray. “We don’t cry,” his father said.

A bug-eyed orderly appeared with yet another dismal lunch on a brown plastic tray. Dave picked at the tough beef and dried potatoes and consoled himself with the tub of raspberry ripple ice cream. A squat nurse arrived to prod and poke. Just as she asked after his latest bowel movement, a second nurse approached, her face splattered with dark freckles. “You have a visitor.”

Mrs. Hennessy slow-walked into the male ward, every eye trained on her top-heavy figure and those long legs inside fitted white jeans, a matching jacket folded over her crossed forearms. She removed a green, glossy apple from the jacket’s pocket and held it out on her palm. Such a curious, childish thing to bring, and yet the offering sent the same rush through his veins as the morphine. He couldn’t stop the smile that cracked his face. She placed the apple on his bedside locker and floated down onto the orange chair, brought back by the square-jawed orderly.

She whistled low. “McMurtagh’s truck did a right job. Almost made sand and gravel out of you.”

Every person in town and beyond knew McMurtagh’s trucks, their convoys constantly on the go at speed, transferring loads from quarries to sites. She looked at his pillows rather than his face. He imagined what she’d seen at the accident—the blood from his head splattered on the concrete like a fired paintball bullet. He must still look repulsive. He pictured his puffy face, as pale in places as his bandages, and the rest a mess of bluish bruises and grazed, open skin. Even before the accident, he hadn’t cut much of a figure. At fifty-five, he had a belly, gray in his brown hair, and his equally dull eyes were set too far apart beneath straight brows.

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