Wrong

It happens on Saturday morning at 9.37.

You are eating breakfast with your parents - french toast, a proper breakfast for once, not just an apple or a bit of re-heated pizza. You say something kind of stupid, maybe about that awesome new book you're reading, or how Hawkeye is so much cooler than Daredevil ever was, or "Dad, seriously, stop stealing my bacon!" Dad just chuckles and Mom thumps her head against the table.

Perfectly normal, they're laughing at you. Everything's fine.

Until you realize that Mom banged her head down right in the middle of her plate, and she's not getting back up.

You sit there for a second or two and make nervous eye-contact with Dad. If this was a joke, it's long past funny. He grabs her by the shoulders and pulls her up. It soon becomes clear that everything is not fine. Her eyes are open, staring off into space as maple syrup oozes down her face. She doesn't blink and she's bleeding where she cut her forehead on an upturned fork.

If this was a Red Cross lesson, you'd have checked her Airway, Breathing and Circulation before putting her on the floor in the recovery position. But you forget all that. Dad makes a half-hearted attempt to get the worst of the syrup off her face with a wet flannel, and you decide to ring for help.

By the time help arrives, she's come to. She doesn't even remember getting up that morning.

You fidget all day, waiting for Dad to bring her back from the hospital. The end of semester exams start next Monday - Math and English first - but you can't study. You snap out of a daze at half past four and realize that you've spent an entire day staring at the wall with your headphones in but no music playing.

When they do get home, Dad's upbeat and reassuring, which surprisingly doesn't help. He's talking to you in a calm, painfully positive voice about the results, and it doesn't matter that you've seen every episode of House M.D, because everything goes right over your head. Words like 'epileptogenic' and 'cavernous hemangioma' - cavernous does not sound very promising, you think to yourself. Cavernous is the kind of word you use for really big holes, and really big holes sound particularly bad when they're in your mum's brain.

He says, "Don't worry, Dr. Rutter said it's benign," and that actually freaks you out most of all, because benign (you know from your borderline obsession with Wikipedia and that four months you spent when you were ten watching General Hospital reruns every night) is only used before awful, ugly words like tumor.

It is a tumor, funnily enough.

"It's not like she's going to die or anything," he says, and you panic a bit because you hadn't even thought of that.


Three months later, it turns out that Dr. Rutter was wrong.

Your Dad was wrong.

You were wrong too.

('Terminal' is a much uglier word that 'benign' ever was.)