Chapter XVI
Put A Quarter In And Enjoy A Ride On The Six Second Carousel
Jane yawned tiredly as she shuffled back to Eddie's room, a steaming paper cup of coffee sloshing in her hand.
Both China and Jane had been awake for more than forty-eight hours and the effect was already taking hold.
Eddie's doctor - Laura - had entered and exited randomly throughout the time, always bringing something for China to do, anything to keep her busy.
Jane didn't quite no why, but China had taken a real liking to Laura and soon the pair were almost inseparable. China would follow Laura around and ask what she was doing to her father and the machines that were all around him, and Laura would answer every question thrown to her.
From what Jane could put together from the interrogation by the police officer in her apartment and from what Laura had been telling her, Eddie had been shot above the left eye. The bullet hadn't been very accurate, because it had hit at a lucky angle, which displaced its embedding into his skull, instead making it bounce off.
But the bad part to the story was that the bullet had knocked him off balance and he had fallen backwards and smashed his head on the pavement, which had done the damage to his brain and sent him into the coma.
She kept having these horrible depictions of what the police officer had told her about Eddie being fully conscious when they had arrived, and he kept trying to get up, saying that he had to get back home to his daughter's birthday party.
Jane wiped the tears away from her eyes with one hand and opened the door with the other, compassion and surprise overtaking her as she saw what lay in the room.
China was curled comfortably between her father's chest and arm, her head sideways on her dad's chest and her eyes open, a nest of the blanket covering both her and her father.
China smiled meekly at Jane as she noticed her standing there and closed her eyes, trying to hide away from her mother. When she finally summed up the courage to peek out from beneath her eyelids, she was confronted with a half-hearted scolding.
'Remember what I said about not touching daddy? He has to get better' Jane signed, already having set the coffee down on a table next to a big, puffy chair.
'I know' China brought her hands out from beneath the blanket. 'He told me to'
'Honey' Jane sighed again 'Daddy can't tell you to do anything, he's asleep.'
'I know' Her big, blue eyes suddenly filled with tears as she put on her sad face.
Jane came forward and China hunkered down into the blanket, signaling that she was not moving from her new spot.
'Do you want to color another picture for daddy?' Jane tried, momentarily averting her journey so that she picked up a large red crayon and a coloring book Laura had brought in for China.
China shook her head, hiding her face against her father's side.
'Baby, you have to get out of there, he's not going get better if we -'
Jane stopped dead in her tracks as Eddie coughed, a wet, weak noise that sounded little more than a choking wheeze. This was his first sign of movement or life he had expressed since before the second accident.
Jane immediately dropped the book and crayon and ran to her husband's side, clasping onto his hand with one shaking hand while she pushed the call button with the other, over and over, so many times that she was still pushing as Laura came back into the room.
"What's up?" Laura asked coolly, still dressed in the same attire, except now she had a stethoscope slung over her neck like all the doctors on the crappy soaps do.
"He's waking up." Jane's words were so quiet that Laura barely heard her, but from the wheezing noise coming from Eddie, she figured it out.
"Well, well, well, rise and shine sunshine patriot." Laura smiled, checking the vital statistics on the monitors about him and finally seemed to come to a conclusion.
China lay quiet against him, her eyes closed and her ear still against his chest.
"Jane?" Laura called into Jane's fixed face, her eyes glued to her husband. "Jane? Hello?" She gently poked her in the arm to help her from her catatonic state.
"Huh? What?" Jane mumbled, shaking the absent thoughts from her head and forcing her body to move.
"Could you move China, maybe take her somewhere? I have to get rid of the tube." Laura knew that the whole - pulling the tube from her father's throat - would probably not go over well with China or her mother.
"I'll call you when you can come back in." Laura smiled as she began to ready Eddie and the equipment around him for his surfacing consciousness.
Jane nodded and reluctantly released Eddie's limp hand, pulling China from her father with great problem. China suddenly turned violent as Jane carried her away, savagely beating her mother's back and shoulders as she screamed violently and shed boiling tears.
As soon as the door was shut behind them, Laura went on professionally with her work. She gently folded down the covers and gingery checked his swollen eye, startled when Eddie's hand shot up and grabbed onto her.
"Hey Superman, you awake?" She asked as if she were asking her boyfriend, allowing Eddie to take his time and eventually open his hazy brown eyes to an alien room.
He blinked a couple of times and tensed what could in his body.
"Eddie, do you know where you are?"
A weak shake of his head followed.
"You're in the hospital. Do you know how you got here?"
Another shake of his head.
"You were shot, you've been in a coma for three days now." Laura said matter-of-factly, noticing that he had a flickering remembrance of it and immediately closed his eyes, turning away.
"Alright Eddie, now I'm going to move your head so that we can get the tube out easier." She talked him through it, trying to move his head as little as possible so as not to bruise or damage his brain anymore than what the fall had done.
After a meek gasp and positioning his head so that his chin was tilted up in the air like a horizontal sword-swallower, she put on a pair of plastic gloves and moved a bed pan within fluid reach, then gripped the tube in his throat with both hands.
"Okay, Eddie, I want you to put your hand on the right rail. Right, yeah, that's good. Now I want you to take the deepest inhale you can and blow it all out as hard and as fast as you can. Ready?"
Eddie didn't bother nodding, instead, he commanded his aching chest to fill with as much air as possible and as he felt he was about to burst, the doctor wrenched the tube from his throat.
The extraction was quickly followed by explosion of bile and empty stomach contents brutally retaliating against the withdrawal of the tube from his esophagus, which sent him into a choking war between gasping, puking, and gagging.
After about five minutes, Eddie collapsed back into the pillow, his face ashen and his hair wild and wet and bile dribbling from his chin.
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Laura laughed as she quickly threw away the tubing and bagged the gloves, throwing them into a sterilized bag along with everything else they had just used. Then she took a towel and wiped the dribble from his chin without a second look, allowing him to reclaim his breath.
Eddie gave her a reckless sideways glare before doubling over into another coughing fit. Laura helped steady him and waited until he was done to begin untying the now-stained paper gown from his back.
He sat silently as she pulled it away, crumpled it up, and threw it away in the trash, pausing momentarily to inspect the scar from the removal of his appendix with her fingers.
"What happened here?" She asked, more to herself then to Eddie.
She looked back up to Eddie's face and smiled as he refused to look at her, his eyes trailing elsewhere in the room.
"So," She said, pulling him forward so that his head settled against her shoulder so she could tie a new paper gown around him. "Your wife's pretty."
Eddie shot a half-hearted, disapproving look in her general direction as she helped settle him back and pull the blankets back up to his shoulders.
"Touchy subject, huh?" Laura laughed.
Eddie closed his eyes and began lifting his head and breathing becoming irregular as he tried to form words.
"…Wh…y…can…t…I…see…?" He finally choked out, his voice barely an audible, rasping whisper.
Laura stitched her eyebrows, taking out her spotlight pen and shining it into Eddie's only good eye, then she moved her finger back and forth in front of his face, but his eye stayed transfixed in one spot.
"I don't know, we'll have to take you down for a CAT scan, hold on." She said, turning towards the intercom.
As she turned back to ready the bed for mobility, Eddie haphazardly caught her by the arm.
She waited as he built up his breath to say what he wanted to say.
"P…lease…get…Jane…"
*MOO*
China had her face stuck against the cold glass, her breath spreading a thin sheet of fog across it each time she breathed out. But unlike the glass at the apartment in the winter, there was a strange room beyond, not familiar buildings.
The blue line scanned down her dad's body as the bed moved up within the donut shaped machine. She didn't understand why they couldn't be in there with him, and it made her scared and angry at the same time.
Jane was standing next to Laura behind a row of computers on the other side of the same room China was in.
"Let me get this straight," Jane tried to explain it to herself aloud. "Eddie can't see because the swelling from his brain is blocking something in his eyes?" Jane lifted her head from her hand, looking back out to where Eddie lay patient.
"More or less." Laura said gravely, the first time Jane had never seen expression on her face besides happiness.
"How long until the swelling starts to go down?" Jane asked, chewing on her bottom lip as she looked over to China, who's small, round face was now looking in her direction.
'I want daddy' China's big eyes shined in the lights as she puffed out her cheeks in frustration, looking longingly toward her father in the other room. She had not seen him since she was pulled reluctantly from him earlier.
'I know baby' was all Jane could sign back, confusion static in her head as she tried to force down new things that threatened to rise back up.
"I don't know, it could be about a week."
"A week?" Jane thought about it, looking back at her husband as if it would help make a decision for her.
"…Hello?…" Eddie's voice came weak through the intercom that connected the two rooms.
"Yeah baby?" Jane pushed the button, her voice collapsing over the small room with a violent thunder and Jane was hushed into a whisper.
"…Jane…" Eddie's voice was unusually calm. "…What…s…going….on…?"
"Dr. Zigman says that your brain is swelling, that's why you can't see." Jane bit on her lip, trying desperately not to tumble into tears.
"…Oh…" He seemed to think about it silently.
"…When…can…we…go…ho…me…?" He asked.
"Soon baby," She said, cutting off the line before he heard her begin to cry. She immediately collected herself and turned to Laura. "Can we go in there now?"
"Yeah, sure." Laura stood where she was as Jane walked over and took China gently by the hand, leading her towards the door.
Jane missed her catch as China clambered up onto the bed and stood over her dad, her mother's hands protectively around her waist.
'Daddy?' China signed, turning to her mother when he didn't answer back.
'He's blind' Jane signed.
'What's blind?'
'It's when you can't see'
China nodded understandably and turned back to her father, reaching down carefully and touching him on the arm, drawing back when he moved toward her direction.
"That was China," Jane said soothingly, finally releasing China with one hand and taking hold in his.
'…Come…here…' Eddie held up his arms, bidding China to come to him.
Jane reluctantly released China, who sat down to gently straddle her father's lower ribs, looking into his face.
He smiled, raising a finger to tickle her tummy.
'…Hey…sunshine…I….missed you…'
Put A Quarter In And Enjoy A Ride On The Six Second Carousel
Jane yawned tiredly as she shuffled back to Eddie's room, a steaming paper cup of coffee sloshing in her hand.
Both China and Jane had been awake for more than forty-eight hours and the effect was already taking hold.
Eddie's doctor - Laura - had entered and exited randomly throughout the time, always bringing something for China to do, anything to keep her busy.
Jane didn't quite no why, but China had taken a real liking to Laura and soon the pair were almost inseparable. China would follow Laura around and ask what she was doing to her father and the machines that were all around him, and Laura would answer every question thrown to her.
From what Jane could put together from the interrogation by the police officer in her apartment and from what Laura had been telling her, Eddie had been shot above the left eye. The bullet hadn't been very accurate, because it had hit at a lucky angle, which displaced its embedding into his skull, instead making it bounce off.
But the bad part to the story was that the bullet had knocked him off balance and he had fallen backwards and smashed his head on the pavement, which had done the damage to his brain and sent him into the coma.
She kept having these horrible depictions of what the police officer had told her about Eddie being fully conscious when they had arrived, and he kept trying to get up, saying that he had to get back home to his daughter's birthday party.
Jane wiped the tears away from her eyes with one hand and opened the door with the other, compassion and surprise overtaking her as she saw what lay in the room.
China was curled comfortably between her father's chest and arm, her head sideways on her dad's chest and her eyes open, a nest of the blanket covering both her and her father.
China smiled meekly at Jane as she noticed her standing there and closed her eyes, trying to hide away from her mother. When she finally summed up the courage to peek out from beneath her eyelids, she was confronted with a half-hearted scolding.
'Remember what I said about not touching daddy? He has to get better' Jane signed, already having set the coffee down on a table next to a big, puffy chair.
'I know' China brought her hands out from beneath the blanket. 'He told me to'
'Honey' Jane sighed again 'Daddy can't tell you to do anything, he's asleep.'
'I know' Her big, blue eyes suddenly filled with tears as she put on her sad face.
Jane came forward and China hunkered down into the blanket, signaling that she was not moving from her new spot.
'Do you want to color another picture for daddy?' Jane tried, momentarily averting her journey so that she picked up a large red crayon and a coloring book Laura had brought in for China.
China shook her head, hiding her face against her father's side.
'Baby, you have to get out of there, he's not going get better if we -'
Jane stopped dead in her tracks as Eddie coughed, a wet, weak noise that sounded little more than a choking wheeze. This was his first sign of movement or life he had expressed since before the second accident.
Jane immediately dropped the book and crayon and ran to her husband's side, clasping onto his hand with one shaking hand while she pushed the call button with the other, over and over, so many times that she was still pushing as Laura came back into the room.
"What's up?" Laura asked coolly, still dressed in the same attire, except now she had a stethoscope slung over her neck like all the doctors on the crappy soaps do.
"He's waking up." Jane's words were so quiet that Laura barely heard her, but from the wheezing noise coming from Eddie, she figured it out.
"Well, well, well, rise and shine sunshine patriot." Laura smiled, checking the vital statistics on the monitors about him and finally seemed to come to a conclusion.
China lay quiet against him, her eyes closed and her ear still against his chest.
"Jane?" Laura called into Jane's fixed face, her eyes glued to her husband. "Jane? Hello?" She gently poked her in the arm to help her from her catatonic state.
"Huh? What?" Jane mumbled, shaking the absent thoughts from her head and forcing her body to move.
"Could you move China, maybe take her somewhere? I have to get rid of the tube." Laura knew that the whole - pulling the tube from her father's throat - would probably not go over well with China or her mother.
"I'll call you when you can come back in." Laura smiled as she began to ready Eddie and the equipment around him for his surfacing consciousness.
Jane nodded and reluctantly released Eddie's limp hand, pulling China from her father with great problem. China suddenly turned violent as Jane carried her away, savagely beating her mother's back and shoulders as she screamed violently and shed boiling tears.
As soon as the door was shut behind them, Laura went on professionally with her work. She gently folded down the covers and gingery checked his swollen eye, startled when Eddie's hand shot up and grabbed onto her.
"Hey Superman, you awake?" She asked as if she were asking her boyfriend, allowing Eddie to take his time and eventually open his hazy brown eyes to an alien room.
He blinked a couple of times and tensed what could in his body.
"Eddie, do you know where you are?"
A weak shake of his head followed.
"You're in the hospital. Do you know how you got here?"
Another shake of his head.
"You were shot, you've been in a coma for three days now." Laura said matter-of-factly, noticing that he had a flickering remembrance of it and immediately closed his eyes, turning away.
"Alright Eddie, now I'm going to move your head so that we can get the tube out easier." She talked him through it, trying to move his head as little as possible so as not to bruise or damage his brain anymore than what the fall had done.
After a meek gasp and positioning his head so that his chin was tilted up in the air like a horizontal sword-swallower, she put on a pair of plastic gloves and moved a bed pan within fluid reach, then gripped the tube in his throat with both hands.
"Okay, Eddie, I want you to put your hand on the right rail. Right, yeah, that's good. Now I want you to take the deepest inhale you can and blow it all out as hard and as fast as you can. Ready?"
Eddie didn't bother nodding, instead, he commanded his aching chest to fill with as much air as possible and as he felt he was about to burst, the doctor wrenched the tube from his throat.
The extraction was quickly followed by explosion of bile and empty stomach contents brutally retaliating against the withdrawal of the tube from his esophagus, which sent him into a choking war between gasping, puking, and gagging.
After about five minutes, Eddie collapsed back into the pillow, his face ashen and his hair wild and wet and bile dribbling from his chin.
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Laura laughed as she quickly threw away the tubing and bagged the gloves, throwing them into a sterilized bag along with everything else they had just used. Then she took a towel and wiped the dribble from his chin without a second look, allowing him to reclaim his breath.
Eddie gave her a reckless sideways glare before doubling over into another coughing fit. Laura helped steady him and waited until he was done to begin untying the now-stained paper gown from his back.
He sat silently as she pulled it away, crumpled it up, and threw it away in the trash, pausing momentarily to inspect the scar from the removal of his appendix with her fingers.
"What happened here?" She asked, more to herself then to Eddie.
She looked back up to Eddie's face and smiled as he refused to look at her, his eyes trailing elsewhere in the room.
"So," She said, pulling him forward so that his head settled against her shoulder so she could tie a new paper gown around him. "Your wife's pretty."
Eddie shot a half-hearted, disapproving look in her general direction as she helped settle him back and pull the blankets back up to his shoulders.
"Touchy subject, huh?" Laura laughed.
Eddie closed his eyes and began lifting his head and breathing becoming irregular as he tried to form words.
"…Wh…y…can…t…I…see…?" He finally choked out, his voice barely an audible, rasping whisper.
Laura stitched her eyebrows, taking out her spotlight pen and shining it into Eddie's only good eye, then she moved her finger back and forth in front of his face, but his eye stayed transfixed in one spot.
"I don't know, we'll have to take you down for a CAT scan, hold on." She said, turning towards the intercom.
As she turned back to ready the bed for mobility, Eddie haphazardly caught her by the arm.
She waited as he built up his breath to say what he wanted to say.
"P…lease…get…Jane…"
*MOO*
China had her face stuck against the cold glass, her breath spreading a thin sheet of fog across it each time she breathed out. But unlike the glass at the apartment in the winter, there was a strange room beyond, not familiar buildings.
The blue line scanned down her dad's body as the bed moved up within the donut shaped machine. She didn't understand why they couldn't be in there with him, and it made her scared and angry at the same time.
Jane was standing next to Laura behind a row of computers on the other side of the same room China was in.
"Let me get this straight," Jane tried to explain it to herself aloud. "Eddie can't see because the swelling from his brain is blocking something in his eyes?" Jane lifted her head from her hand, looking back out to where Eddie lay patient.
"More or less." Laura said gravely, the first time Jane had never seen expression on her face besides happiness.
"How long until the swelling starts to go down?" Jane asked, chewing on her bottom lip as she looked over to China, who's small, round face was now looking in her direction.
'I want daddy' China's big eyes shined in the lights as she puffed out her cheeks in frustration, looking longingly toward her father in the other room. She had not seen him since she was pulled reluctantly from him earlier.
'I know baby' was all Jane could sign back, confusion static in her head as she tried to force down new things that threatened to rise back up.
"I don't know, it could be about a week."
"A week?" Jane thought about it, looking back at her husband as if it would help make a decision for her.
"…Hello?…" Eddie's voice came weak through the intercom that connected the two rooms.
"Yeah baby?" Jane pushed the button, her voice collapsing over the small room with a violent thunder and Jane was hushed into a whisper.
"…Jane…" Eddie's voice was unusually calm. "…What…s…going….on…?"
"Dr. Zigman says that your brain is swelling, that's why you can't see." Jane bit on her lip, trying desperately not to tumble into tears.
"…Oh…" He seemed to think about it silently.
"…When…can…we…go…ho…me…?" He asked.
"Soon baby," She said, cutting off the line before he heard her begin to cry. She immediately collected herself and turned to Laura. "Can we go in there now?"
"Yeah, sure." Laura stood where she was as Jane walked over and took China gently by the hand, leading her towards the door.
Jane missed her catch as China clambered up onto the bed and stood over her dad, her mother's hands protectively around her waist.
'Daddy?' China signed, turning to her mother when he didn't answer back.
'He's blind' Jane signed.
'What's blind?'
'It's when you can't see'
China nodded understandably and turned back to her father, reaching down carefully and touching him on the arm, drawing back when he moved toward her direction.
"That was China," Jane said soothingly, finally releasing China with one hand and taking hold in his.
'…Come…here…' Eddie held up his arms, bidding China to come to him.
Jane reluctantly released China, who sat down to gently straddle her father's lower ribs, looking into his face.
He smiled, raising a finger to tickle her tummy.
'…Hey…sunshine…I….missed you…'