Whiskey & Charlie by Annabel Smith

Author:Annabel Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2015-02-04T05:00:00+00:00

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Ever since the G-tube operation, Charlie has been avoiding the hospital. Initially he told himself that all the time he’d spent at the hospital had worn him out, that he needed a few days to regroup, recover his strength. But he finds that the longer he stays away, the less he wants to go back.

“It’s awful, isn’t it,” Juliet says, “just waiting for something else to go wrong?”

But in fact, it is not the feeling that something might go wrong at any moment that frightens Charlie—it is the absence of that feeling.

In the first couple of weeks after the accident, when everything had been a matter of life and death, Charlie had been able to occupy himself with learning about coma, understanding the particulars of Whiskey’s condition, finding his way around the hospital, getting to know the staff. There had been the surgical procedures required to stabilize Whiskey’s condition, the endless testing, the medical emergencies—a constant flurry of activity, which had left Charlie with neither the time nor the energy to think beyond the immediate problems they were facing.

But the insertion of the G-tube seems to have marked a turning point. Charlie gets the impression that the medical staff are no longer expecting that Whiskey might die at any moment, but they are no longer expecting that he might wake from the coma either. Whiskey is still monitored constantly by the nurses in the intensive care unit; the therapists still come daily. But the sense of anticipation that surrounded Whiskey seems to have ebbed away, leaving a gap. And it is into this gap that Charlie’s thoughts flood, the thoughts he has, until then, managed to keep at bay.

And that is the real reason why he can no longer bear to be at the hospital, and, more importantly, why he can’t bear to be left alone with Whiskey, not even for the five or ten minutes it takes Rosa or his mother to get a coffee or freshen up in the bathroom. Because Charlie can’t stand to sit there beside Whiskey, asking himself the same question over and over again: Why didn’t he accept Whiskey’s apology when he had the chance?

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